


Stowaway

by Trillian_Astra



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Drowning, F/F, mermaid au, navy AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2014-01-23
Packaged: 2018-01-09 19:22:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trillian_Astra/pseuds/Trillian_Astra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amy Santiago left home and stowed away on a ship, because she wanted to have adventures and wasn't particularly interested in marrying the boy her parents chose for her. The ship's captain turned out to be in need of a second mate, so he let her stay on, and it looked like a dream come true. And that was BEFORE the mermaid showed up in her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stowaway

Amy kept her eyes shut tight, and curled herself into an even smaller ball, and tried not to breathe too loudly. She could hear footsteps nearby, and the sound of voices. The two men in the storeroom with her – she thought there were two, she could hear two voices – were complaining about being sent to fetch something by the Captain.  
“Huh,” a voice said, “I don’t remember loading that…” The voice sounded very, very close to her hiding place. She opened one eye cautiously, saw a man looking down at her, and tried to get further behind the barrels that had hidden her.  
“Uh-uh,” the other voice said, and soon she was being pulled out from her hiding place. “So who are you, then?”  
She almost blurted out Amy, but swallowed it and remembered that she was dressed like a boy. “Al-Alfredo,” she said. “I wanted to be a sailor but my parents wouldn’t let me, so I ran away and hid down here, please don’t throw me off the ship…”  
“Whoa, whoa,” the younger of the men said, “No-one’s getting thrown off the ship.” He glanced at his companion. “At least, not yet. We’ll take you to the captain, kid. Maybe he’ll let you stay on.”  
“Really?” she said excitedly. “I mean… uh, that would be good.”  
The two men – Jake and Charles, she learnt – took her up on deck and led her to the Captain’s quarters.  
“Did you find that chart?” the man who must have been the captain said, without looking up from the papers he was working on.  
“Uh, yeah,” Jake said, “and something else…”  
The captain looked up. “A stowaway.”  
“Name’s Alfredo. He’s…” Jake turned to her, “how old are you, kid?”  
“Uh, sixteen, sir.”  
“Wanted to be a sailor, so he stowed away. We found him belowdecks, behind some barrels.”  
“Hm,” the captain said. “Leave the chart and… Alfredo… here, I’m sure you have duties to get back to.”  
“Yes, sir,” they said, and moments later it was just Amy and the captain. Amy swallowed, and wondered what he was going to do to her.  
“So… Alfredo. That is your real name, yes? Seems very masculine to me.”  
“Ye- what?”  
“I know you’re a girl. Your disguise isn’t that good. Who are you really?”  
She looked at him curiously. “What happens if I tell you? Can I stay on the ship? Going to sea is all I’ve ever wanted…”  
“There might be a place for you here. If you’re honest with me.”  
She could tell that he was telling the truth. “My name is Amelia Santiago,” she eventually said. “But most people call me Amy. I’m nineteen. I really did run away from home, but it was because my family wanted me to get married. I didn’t want to.”  
The captain stood up. “It’s a pleasure, Miss Santiago. I’m Captain Holt, and this is the _Brooklyne_.”  
“So, am I allowed to stay?”  
“Are you willing to work hard? With little reward? In a place mostly populated by men?”  
“I have seven older brothers, sir. I’m used to dealing with men. And I’m not afraid of hard work.”  
“Hm,” he said again, considering her. “I have been looking for a new second mate, the last one jumped ship the last time we were in port.”  
“Would the crew respect me? They don’t know me.”  
“I’m sure you won’t find that difficult. And you won’t be the only woman on board, either… I’ll introduce you to Mistress Linetti, our quartermaster, later.”  
“So you’re saying I can stay? You’re not going to throw me overboard?”  
“No, Miss Santiago, I’m not going to throw you overboard.”  
“Thank you!” she cried out as she moved to hug him. Fortunately she saw the look on his face and stopped herself. “Sorry, sir,” she said instead.  
She expected him to say something, to reproach her or even retract his offer of work. But he didn’t. Without any ceremony, he said, “The post of second mate does come with a separate cabin – which I think, given the circumstances, would be for the best. Do you have much with you?”  
Amy shook her head. “Just this,” she said, holding up the rough sack in which she had a couple of spare shirts and the few personal items she couldn’t bear to leave behind.  
“This way, Miss Santiago.” He led her out of his quarters and took her to the second mate’s cabin, which was barely big enough for a bunk and a place to store her clothes. Amy looked at it and smiled.  
“It’s perfect,” she said, unable to suppress a smile.  
“It’s the best you’ll get,” the Captain said. “Put your bag on the hook, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the crew.”  
The rest of the crew turned out to be the first mate, the impressively muscular Terry, the two who’d found her in the hold, the quartermaster – a woman in breeches and a man’s shirt, who studied Amy briefly with a cool look in her eyes, and a selection of sailors who stood about in small groups and watched her every movement. At least that’s what it felt like to Amy.  
The duties of the second mate, Terry explained to her, was basically to supervise one of the watches (whichever one the first mate wasn’t in charge of), and keep the sailors working as a team. She spent one intense day following Terry around and watching everything he did, and then she was left to her own devices. She knew how to sail, could tie knots with the best of them, but there was a difference between this and the sailing she’d done with her brothers at home.  
Fortunately, it turned out that the sailors on her watch pretty much knew what they were doing, barring the odd minor accident. So after the first week, she found that most of her time was spent watching to make sure that no-one injured themselves too badly, and in the quieter moments trying to learn as much as she could from the Captain and trying to get the quartermaster to talk to her. She’d tried appealing to her sense of female solidarity, which hadn’t worked, and she really didn’t know how to get through to the woman.  
She was thinking about precisely that one evening, and looking out over the bow of the ship, when she felt a hand on her back. “Ello,” a rum-soaked voice muttered in her ear. “What’re you doin’ out here all alone?”  
She turned around and saw one of the sailors – one from Terry’s watch, though, not hers. “…Dale? That’s your name, right? I think you should go below and sleep it off, you’ve had enough rum…”  
He laughed harshly. “Look at you, li’l girl tellin’ me what to do like tha’… I don’ agree, though…” He put his arm around her, pulling her closer against him, and tried to kiss her.  
She grimaced at the smell of stale alcohol, and drove her elbow hard into his stomach. As he stumbled back, she thought about her seven older brothers back home, and smiled to herself. He grabbed for her, and they tussled for a moment, and – before she even knew what was happening – he was toppling backwards over the railing, towards the water.  
Amy leant over the railing, watching him fall. “Oh…,” she murmured.  
Dale was floundering about in the water, drunkenly yelling for a rope. He didn’t see the slender shape pass underneath him, but Amy did. She also saw the woman with the dark curly hair emerge from the water and grab him, clapping a hand over his mouth to silence him.  
Amy blinked in confusion, and looked closer to see the shimmering scales on the woman’s shoulders, and the shadowy shape of a fin below the surface of the water. _A mermaid_ , she thought, and smiled.  
“Hello,” the mermaid called out. “Is he bothering you?” she asked in curiously accented English.  
“Uh… um, I suppose…”  
The mermaid looked at the struggling sailor, scowled, and dove under the water, dragging the hapless Dale with her. Amy was left watching the bubbles rising from the surface of the water in shock.  
The mermaid reappeared several minutes later, alone. “You don’t have to worry about him any more,” she said.  
“Is he… dead?”  
The mermaid gave her an incredulous look. “Well, unless he grew gills in the last five seconds… yeah.”  
“Oh.”  
“He deserved it,” the mermaid said with a shrug.  
“He was just drunk,” Amy said, “He didn’t mean it.”  
Another incredulous look came her way. “Seriously? You humans… if someone’s hassling you, they’re hassling you. He was a male, of course he meant it. You’d be better off as one of my people, we don’t take any of that shit.”  
Amy thought about that for a long time. Eventually she said, quietly, “But I don’t have gills…”  
The mermaid laughed. “Good one… hey, what’s your name?”  
“Uh, Amy.”  
“Nice to meet you, Amy. You can call me Rosa. Where’s your ship headed?”  
“The Caribbean… why?”  
“Oh, sweet, my pod’s heading down that way too. It’s a seasonal thing, we always follow the currents down there at about this time of year.”  
“Oh. Why’d you want to know?”  
Rosa shrugged. “I think I like you, Amy. I thought maybe we could talk some more, seeing as we’re going the same way. Plus I can deal with anyone else that tries to hassle you.”  
“Uh… thanks, I suppose. Oh,” Amy gasped, “I should tell the captain. Um. Should I mention you?”  
“Probably best if you don’t.”  
“You’re right… I’ll just say he was drunk and fell overboard, and I couldn’t get a rope to him in time.”  
That was, in fact, almost exactly what she told Captain Holt. There was a brief, solemn service, followed by a stern reminder that a ship under full sail was a bad place to get falling-down drunk. Then the crew went to their duties, or the galley, and only Amy was left thinking about what had happened. Part of her thought she should tell the captain about Rosa. Another part of her wanted to keep Rosa a secret.  
She started spending a lot of her spare time at the bow of the ship, looking out at the water. Looking for Rosa, though she was hesitant to admit that even to herself.  
“Hey,”  
She jumped when she heard Rosa’s voice call up to her.  
“Rosa?”  
The mermaid gave her an incredulous look. “You expecting anyone else?”  
“Uh, no, you just surprised me.”  
Rosa nodded. “So, did you tell your captain about the…” she mimed a person drowning.  
“Yeah. Everyone thinks he was drunk and fell overboard.”  
“You know, if anyone else tries to hassle you, you can tell me. I’ll sort them out.”  
“Um. I know. Thanks.” Amy looked down at her hands. “So, tell me about yourself,” she said.  
Rosa looked uncomfortable for a moment, then launched into a complicated explanation of mermaid society, all the while keeping pace with the ship as it ploughed on through the ocean. Amy leant on the railing and listened carefully to every word. Later, when Rosa had gone back to meet her pod and Amy’s watch had gone down to the galley for dinner, she thought about her decision to run away, her decision to hide herself on this ship, and the captain’s decision to let her stay. She thought about her brothers back home, and about the boy her parents had wanted her to marry.  
She thought about all of those things, but she also thought about the feeling of salty water spraying up into her face, and the look in Rosa’s eyes when they talked, and she decided that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.


End file.
